Flying Spaghetti Monster

The last week was non-stop story writing. Unlike a traditional script, mine has an interactive element. Meaning any reasonable question the player wants to pose in the context of the story — e.g.: Gandalf, why don’t you just fly the ring over to Mordor on your magical eagles? — needs to have an appropriate contextual response, lest the story feel broken or the characters cardboard. The game must also acknowledge a player’s past dialogue choices and actions — has a player seen the knife? did she call the butler a jerk? Important decisions carry forward throughout the story.

Suffice to say, this gets complicated. If you’d like a peek behind the curtain, here’s about a tenth of the script for my first mystery (each box is a different passage of text, and the lines that connect them are player choices):

But so far, the (very) few people who have tried the game have each approached some problems differently — solutions that I hadn’t thought of, but that my script must recognize.

Which means I have a lot more writing to do! Wish me luck!

Weekly blog posts are becoming a chore. I’ve been trying to keep them up, but I’m not sure this schedule makes sense anymore. Without travel, there’s no longer enough content every week, and I’m giving less attention to each post.

I’m going to switch this blog to bi-weekly.

This will give me more time to write engaging content — maybe even some essays like the ones I linked last week. And more game development happens in a fortnight, so project updates can be meatier as well.